My PhD in brief

I know it does not quite fit into the format of this website but I wanted to summarise my PhD and the perspectives it gave me. I have learned a lot during the last 9 years, since I began my undergrad studies. Almost a decade of learnings. However, the most important lesson was the realisation that, despite everything, I hardly know anything. So this update is also about how this experience has shaped my views in that regard.

About my research

My research topic, i.e. the degradation of persistent pollutants, is important because some of our farmlands are still contaminated with super-uber persistent (and toxic) insecticides since the 1980s. These type of chemicals were later internationally banned by a UN treaty, which was signed by the majority of the world’s countries. In the 1980s at the latest, it was recognised that residues of these pollutants were literally everywere, including in grazing animals, eggs and even in human breast milk. They accumulated in soils, animals and humans globally.

Today these residues keep persisting in soils. The irony is that those insecticides persist longest in the most valuable soils and will remain in there for generations to come. So we were wondering how land managers and farmers should manage these contaminated lands to make sure these insecticides degrade faster. We wanted to focus on the role of soil microbes because degradation is commonly mediated by microbes and we know hardly anything about these processes.

Hence, during my PhD studies I learned some specific methods to investigate some specific questions relating to soil pollution and soil diversity. For example, I learned a new language called R and how to use it to visualise and analyse complex datasets involving microbial phylogeny, function and abundances. Subsequently, the results showed that the activity of microbes that have the potential to degrade persistent pollutants might be promoted or inhibited by certain carbon materials. We have published two papers and a third is hopefully accepted soon too. Check them out here.

The results may provide some direction for future research. Overall, that was good news because it meant that we can start to drill down into the type of management practices that farmers should adopt to increase the rate of pollutant-degradation. But a lot more research is needed to advice policy and help farmers to reduce long-term risks of soil pollution. As always in science, my results have to be replicated by others to make sure they point into the right direction.

This is it for me. I have written up my thesis and am racing to the finishing line with aim to submit in August. My thesis, should it be accepted, will be available in the La Trobe University library at some stage. However, my wish is that this research can continue in some form or another. At the moment there are not many funding opportunities as there are so many other priorities. Apart from the affected farmers and some dedicated academics and officials - not many people seem to care about this issue anymore. Its a hidden and unknown long-term risk, literally lurking in the ground.

About research in general

Warning: The following views may be unfounded. I would love your feedback if you disagree with anything.

Something that kept bugging me is that research is funded and driven more and more by industry. I am not a greenie when I say that it is important that research funding should be allocated on a needs basis. My view is that these ‘needs’ should fundamentally not be determined by industry and instead by the constituency.

Research should solve problems that improve communities. However, industries commonly think short-term and are incentivised by self-interest, which does not consider the long-term health of communities. Healthy communities on the other hand, are the foundation for any industry and therefore need nurturing to prosper. Indeed, it would be counter to industry interests, if communities destabilise in the long-term. However, it appears that in Australia, government bodies and universities are just instruments to achieve the goals of (especially large) industries. Questions on how to built an sustain a healthy and stable society appear to be of secondary importance.

Furthermore, sometimes the community-needs arise from scienctific knowledge and are difficult to understand by the community. People must be feeling like that some of these abstract concepts are written into the stars, far-reaching and too long-term. That is why we need leaders that understand scientific concepts and translate them into wise leadership, pulling the right levers, getting all stakeholders together, deciding on structural changes for the next 50-100 years, setting the groundwork and communicating that properly and openly to the community. I think this approach would be a big opportunity to improve economic resilience for Australia into the future. I just cannot see that happening at the moment…happy to be proven wrong of course.

Take my research topic for example: If we had invested more time in the 60s to 70s to research the use of organochlorine insecticides in agriculture (at the time, the people that raised their voice were called ‘hippies’), we may have prevented not only the hardship of affected farmers into generations, but also a very expensive fall-out for the beef industry who suddenly were faced with export bans from Australia. And as so often, the communities pay the long-term consequences. In this case, a publicly funded national program was set up, together with the affected meat industry, to monitor soil and meat concentrations - until today!!. My PhD to research this was also publicly funded by the Research Training Scholarship program (RTP), which I really appreciated by the way. But all these are resources spent on something that perhaps was avoidable with some long-term thinking.

This fall-out must also have caused some major disruptions for the beef-industry and required national resources and collaboration to remediate the issue. Not to mention the international UN program that was needed to monitor concentrations of these chemicals globally, because they are so stable that they can travel to the arctic, contaminating wildlife and food sources nowadays… its just crazy! All of this only because we listened to industry who offered something that was too good to be true - and we naively believed them. I mean don’t get me wrong, these insecticides worked really well and improved crop productivity. No-one wanted to hear about potential long-term consequences until it was too late. But the pleasure was short-lived. You might find this type of hindsight applies to many other topics/industries which will affect us long into future. A few decades of fun before longer-termed consequences hit us in the face. Perhaps, we cannot call it hindsight anymore as this appears to become more and more predictable human behaviour unfortunately.

Main take-away for me:

I therefore learned that we should embrace our naiveties and question everything. We are all naive in some way. We pretend to know stuff but the truth is that we hardly know anything. I often get ideas wrong or take other ideas for granted. But the thing I took away from the last 9 years is that we always need to question ideas. If we keep questioning ideas we can be wrong about them as often as we like because we keep adjusting, learning and growing from them. Only if we keep asking the tough questions can we make robust decisions. Don’t be afraid to be wrong. Embrace it. This is how we truely improve and grow.

Feedback and comments are always welcome.